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Trumps Environment Pick: Fossil Fuels Ended Slavery, CO2 Is Good for You

One of the most embarrassing political flops of 2017 was Donald Trumps nomination of Kathleen Hartnett White, a longtime fossil-fuel advocate, to direct the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Her confirmation hearing was a disaster, captured for posterity on YouTube. While she made it out of committee on party lines, the full Senate declined to consider her nomination as part of a bipartisan deal.

Now, shes back.

To the surprise of Hill-watchers, White has been re-nominated, setting up a showdown with Democrats and Republicans alike. (Per Senate rules, nominees not confirmed at the end of the year must be re-submitted.) One observer called her the most endangered of President Trumps environmental nominees.

First, it was revealed that many of her written answers to the committee were apparently cut and pasted, word for word, from the answers submitted by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and his assistant Bill Wehrum.

Then came the hearing itself.

At one point, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse asked White to estimate how much of the excess heat from climate change is stored in the oceansa detailed question for you or me, but pretty standard for a climate-policy person. White said she didnt know, but said there were many opinions and no right answer. Thats the fossil-fuel industrys refrain, of course.

Whitehouse asked if there was a serious scientific opinion that its below 50 percent. White said yes. Whitehouse said, Wow.

Then Sen. Whitehouse asked if White agreed that water expands as it heats, a principle that can be proven on any kitchen stovetop. White said, I do not have any kind of expertise or even much laymans study of the ocean dynamics.

For good measure, White also contradicted the EPAs new policy that its scientists may not attend conferences on climate-change science, and contradicted her own published statement that the IPCCs highly politicized and speculative science [is] increasingly contradicted by empirical evidence, saying at the hearing that the intergovernmental panel of climate-change scientists is a very good source.

Sen. Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement, In the 17 years I have been in the Senate, I have never sat through a hearing as excruciating as Ms. Whites.

Nor was the hearing a one-time flub. Heres a 2015 video in which, tripping over her words, White praises the really beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Satellites already show a greening of the earth, in part from very small amount of carbon dioxide involved with using fossil fuels.

No matter how many times, [sic] the President, EPA, and press rant about dirty carbon pollution, there is no pollution about carbon itself! As a dictionary will tell you, carbon is the chemical basis of all life. Our flesh, blood, and bones are built of carbon. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the gas of life on this planet, an essential nutrient for plant growth on which human life depends. How craftily our government has masked these fundamental realities and the environmental benefits of fossil fuels!

The only question is whether White is knowingly deceiving people in such statements, or whether she is indeed so ignorant or brainwashed that she believes this sort of thing. Is she a dupe or a knave? Im not sure.

White is also a conspiracy theorist. Her opinion on climate change isnt just that its not so bad (a position at odds with 99.5 percent of actual climate scientists) but that the whole thing is, as Trump once said, a hoax. In that same Townhall piece, White wrote:

As the evidence for unprecedented warming temperatures, extreme weather events, declining Arctic ice, and rising sea levels wanes, the entrenched warmists grasp for familiar tags such as pollution or environmental protection to sanitize their grand schemes to decarbonize human societies.

Second, theres the conspiracy-mongering: grand schemes to decarbonize human societies. White has made this claim many times: that the entire climate-science field, all around the world, is actually a cabal to undermine fossil fuels.

Why would they want to do so? Leftist totalitarianism. In a 2014 blog post, she wrote, referring to MSNBCs Chris Hayes, Sometimes a single voice throws in hard relief the delusion, misanthropy, and unabashedly totalitarian policy of the Left. These characteristics are particularly embedded in the Left's secular religion: Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming.

That was also the piece in which White wrote that There is, in fact, a historical connection between the abolition of slavery and humanitys first widespread use of energy from fossil fuels.

(Her point is that industrialization and urbanization were enabled by the use of coal and oil. In fact, the Industrial Revolution increased demand for slave-labor-produced raw materials, making slavery more lucrative. Also, you know, the abolition of slavery may have had other causes as well.)

But look closer. TPPF is part of the State Policy Network, a system of conservative think tanks that are funded by Koch-backed dark-money groups DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, as well as the Koch-backed Claude R. Lambe and Charles G. Koch foundations, and ExxonMobil.

Like many such think tanks, the TPPF is fake. The only thinking that goes on is of thoughts that Big Oil pays for.

When White ran the TCEQ, she voted to build a new coal plant near Dallas, despite opposition from officials in 24 cities and counties; falsified data to help polluters get around water regulations; and, according to a 2003 Texas state audit, did not consistently ensure violators are held accountable for pollution.

This is how one makes a career as a lackey for the fossil-fuel industry: First they pay for your fake job, then they get you into a position of power where you implement their policies.You can coast through for decades without anyone calling your bluff.

But the Senate just might: Just two Republican defections would doom Whites candidacy. Eyes are focused, as usual, on Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who has a strong environmental record and who voted against confirming Pruitt, as well as senators from agricultural states that stand to lose if White is confirmed.

Of course, the Senate has confirmed Trumps anti-environmental picks beforebut then, none of them were quite as willfully ignorant as Kathleen White.